Simple Twist of Fate is one of Bob Dylan’s most renowned songs. Since appearing on the epochal Blood on the Tracks in 1975 it has been a staple of his live shows through all his subsequent changes of style and has been played over 800 times in a wide range of musical settings, from solo acoustic to full band extravaganza. It has also been covered by many different artists. The song tells what appears on the surface to be a classically simple story – boy meets girl, boy loses girl, tries to find her again… But the way the story is related allows for any number of diverse musical and lyrical interpretations. Sometimes the music suggests sadness or loneliness. At others the song sounds nothing less than triumphant. It is at once personal and universal, sad and touching and finally uplifting and compassionate. Dylan fans and scholars have debated endlessly over the identity of the woman in the story, with ‘the usual suspects’ – Suze, Joan, Sara and the others – frequently getting a mention. The song has, like the others on the album, often been linked to Dylan’s marriage break up in the mid-70s. But it is written in such a way that we can all impose a number of interpretations on it. Any one of us, perhaps, could be the man or the woman in the unfolding story. Ultimately, it is a profound reflection on the role of chance and destiny in human existence.
Given the distinctiveness of the original lyrics, it is perhaps surprising that they have been changed so much over the song’s performing history. Yet, as with Tangled Up in Blue, Dylan has sometimes completely rewritten whole verses and adapted many individual lines in performance. Both songs were influenced by the painting techniques that Dylan was learning at the time, which he used in his songs to show different events from several perspectives at the same time. The story of Simple Twist is initially related in the third person past tense but the interjections of first person pronouns and present tense narrative provide continual switches of perspective. Simple Twist is also especially cinematic in its construction. Each of its six verses consists of a single, highly visual, scene and listeners are left to construct the rest of the story from their imagination.
The original recording begins with a strummed acoustic guitar, with minimal bass accompaniment by Tony Brown, launching into the plaintive tune. Dylan’s singing is clear and melodic and every word is audible. As with the other songs on Blood on the Tracks the language is less consciously ‘poetic’ than much of his previous work. But we could call this a kind of poetry of every day speech. Each five line verse has a simple AABCC pattern, with varying and often highly effective use of internal rhyme. The first verse begins with the couplet …They sat together in the park/ As the evening sky got dark… This simple and eloquent description is greatly enlivened by the internal rhyme that follows: …She looked at him and he felt a spark tingle to his bones… The key words here are ‘spark’, which rhymes with ‘park’ and ‘dark’ (and is thus given extra emphasis) and ‘tingle’. The highly unusual combination of the two words has a visceral effect, so that we can almost feel the physical and emotional sensation ourselves. Although Dylan has only given us the outline of the scene, we already understand that a particular kind of magic has been created between the two characters. We can also imagine that they have probably only just met and are both experiencing a kind of instant physical and emotional attraction.
The following lines, however, are highly unexpected: …’Twas then he felt alone, and wished that he’d gone straight/ And watched out for a simple twist of fate… Ironically, it is at the moment of special contact that the man feels isolated. Again internal rhyme is used, connecting the physical sensation (‘bones’) with the emotional feeling (‘alone’). A ‘simple twist’ indeed, but one which is highly revealing… Only when the man makes true contact with another human being does his essential isolation from others come home to him. The tone is clearly that of regret. The man wishes he had ‘gone straight’: i.e. given himself fully to her in an emotional sense, rather than holding back. We can already guess that the relationship will not end with the lovers permanently united, as if the song consists of a series of cinematic flashbacks. We can already sense that ‘fate’ will intervene in a tragic way (at least for him) to separate them.
This sense of foreknowledge suggests that the third person ‘he’ is actually a first person ‘I’ who is looking back on the scene through misty tears. This is confirmed in the opening lines of the next verse: …They walked along by the old canal/ A little confused, I remember well… After all the definite and significant rhyming in the last verse, the less definite use of pararhyme (‘canal’/ ‘well’) helps to contribute towards the sense of slight uncertainty being conveyed. The lovers have clearly felt that ‘spark’ but cannot quantify or rationalise it. We then hear that they…stopped into a strange hotel with a neon burning bright… In later versions this becomes an ‘old’ or a ‘renovated’ hotel. In the heavily rewritten 1984 versions it is even named as the ‘Empire’, the ‘Waterfront’ or the ‘Riverfront’ hotel. The word ‘light’ which should logically follow ‘neon’ is omitted here. The phrase ‘burning bright’ famously occurs in Blake’s great symbolist poem The Tyger, where it is rhymed with …forests of the night… and it is these ‘forests’ – areas of mystery and emotional confusion – which the couple are about to enter into as they check into the hotel for a night of passion.
More internal rhyme is then utilised in an incredibly powerful and sensuous way to describe how the man experiences this passion: …He felt the heat of the night/ Hit him like a freight train/ Moving with a simple twist of fate… Of course, it may be that the lovers have met in hot weather – they were, after all, first pictured sitting in a park together even though it is evening – but the phrase ‘heat of the night’ is brilliantly transposed here. The sheer visceral force of the ‘train’ of passion (an image which recalls many blues songs, as well as Johnny Cash’s Train of Love, which Dylan later covered in concert) ‘hitting’ the man is enhanced by the internal rhyming of ‘freight’ with the inevitable ‘twist of fate’ which is to come. But ‘freight’ is not the final word of the line, and thus operates as internal rhyme. This is justified here by the enjambed lines, with the key word ‘moving’ giving us a real physical sense of passion rising and ‘moving’ from the emotional to the physical realm. There is little alteration of the substance of the first two verses in subsequent versions, although in 1984 – a year in which Dylan was radically altering the lyrics almost every night – the lovers encounter …The desk clerk dressed in white/ With a face as black as night…who tells them that …Check out time’s at eight…. This gives the verse a little extra Blakean spin – ‘Forests of the night’ could easily have been substituted here.
The third verse features a highly cinematic ‘cut’ as we immediately switch to a focus on the woman. First of all we get a little snatch of the ‘soundtrack’ as we hear that …a saxophone (in some versions ‘a clarinet’) far off played/ As she was walking by the arcade… In the next line we get a camera movement reminiscent of the famous zoom shot at the beginning of Hitchcock’s Psycho in which we are given ‘intimate’ access to the illicit lovers in bed in a ‘cheap hotel’. We hear that …The light bust through a beat-up shade as he was waking up… The short alliterative link words ‘bust’ and ‘beat’ emphasise the brutal truth of the scene, which will only be fully revealed in the next verse. But it is already clear that it is the next morning and that the woman is no longer in the hotel room. Another clever internal rhyme is then emphasised: …She dropped a coin into the cup (which rhymes with ‘waking up’) of a blind man at the gate… On one level, this is merely an image of her casually dispensing charity to a beggar. Yet the image also reflects back on the man in the hotel. It seems that she has already left him. In a sense he is a ‘blind man’ in that he has imagined that the great passion he has felt for her was a mutual one. In fact this is the final ‘shot’ of the woman as she disappears into the early morning bustle of the city. Cruelly, she has already forgotten about the ‘simple twist’ (i.e., the affair itself).
OPENING SCENE OF ‘PSYCHO’
In most later versions of the song the line about the ‘beat up shade’ is replaced by …She heard a melody rise and fade/ The sun was coming up… This may be rather less cinematic, but it makes it clear to us that she has left in the early morning. The ’melody’ here is of course that emanating from the saxophone (or clarinet) but it is also a reference to the melody of the song itself, which replicates the passion of the lovers which has ‘risen’ and then rather tragically ‘fallen’.
The fourth verse is the most heartbreaking of all, as the man wakes up to find that …the room was bare/ He didn’t see her anywhere… In later versions this becomes …He woke up and she was gone/ He didn’t see nothing but the dawn… In some ways the later lines are more effective, especially as they contain a very Dylanesque double negative in ‘He didn’t see nothing’ which, as well as its literal meaning in colloquial speech, can also indicate that, against his better judgement, he did actually ‘see something’. Unfortunately this substitution meant that the following lines, which are arguably the most powerful, poetic and revealing in the song, had to be replaced to create new rhymes …He told himself he didn’t care, threw the window open wide/ Felt that emptiness inside to which he just could not relate/ Brought on by a simple twist of fate… is so effective because it first presents him apparently not caring that she has gone, but then reveals his true feelings. The action of ‘throwing’ (rather than merely ‘opening’) the window further indicates that he is pretending not to care. But it is the contrast between the window being open wide and his internal feeling of emptiness which is so moving. This also relates back to the strange reference to him feeling ‘alone’ in the first verse. The replacement lines, which Dylan has continued to use throughout the life of the song: …He got out of bed and put his clothes back on/ Pushed back the blinds/ Found a note she left behind… again work to make the story a little clearer, although they could be said to eliminate the aching feeling that the original so brilliantly evokes.
The first lines of the fifth verse: …He hears the ticking of the clocks/ And walks along with a parrot that talks… are the most problematic in the original version. The ‘ticking of the clocks’ makes sense, as time has clearly run out for him, but the line about the ‘parrot’ seems to be a rather ineffective use of symbolism. In live versions this is replaced by some variant of …He walks alone through the city blocks… which is less spectacular but more effective. We now follow the man as he rather desperately …hunts her down by the Waterfront docks/ Where the sailors all come in… This is a highly suggestive line, which has even led some commentators to suggest the woman is a prostitute. This is unlikely, however, as the earlier lines do suggest a genuine romantic frisson between the lovers. There is in fact no evidence that she has gone down to the docks – this is merely his supposition. Dylan then ‘breaks the fourth wall’ in this imaginary movie by intervening as the narrator with a suggestion and a poignant question: …Maybe she’ll pick him out again/ How long must he wait / One more time for a simple twist of fate?… But we surely know now that she is gone forever. Again it is revealed that the narrator and the male protagonist are one and the same. The man is desperately asking himself these questions as he searches in vain for her. But such a ‘simple twist of fate’ will not occur again. We are left with the potent image of him scanning the crowds, hoping for a resolution that will never come. Now we may imagine those words ‘THE END’ coming up, as they always used to in old black and white films.
The final verse consists of a philosophical reflection on the story that has now unfolded. In the original version the narrator clearly reveals to us that he himself was the man in the story: …People tell me it’s a sin/ To know and feel too much within/ I still believe she was my twin, but I lost the ring/ I was born in Spring, but she was born too late/ Blame it on a simple twist of fate… The opening lines reflect on the burden of the poet who ‘knows and feels too much within’. Finally, however, he seems to have accepted the situation but with much regret. It almost seems as if he has come up with an astrological explanation of why the couple parted. Dylan himself is well known to be a Gemini, a spring sign, which also means ‘the twins’. Astrology, of course, is a discourse about fate. But Dylan seems to have been unsatisfied with this conclusion, which suggests that the parting of the lovers was somehow pre-ordained and could therefore not be avoided. His complete revision of the verse, which he even performed in the first live outing of the song on the Tribute to John Hammond TV show in 1975, has remained the version which he has performed in the vast majority of shows since then.
The replacement verse is similarly philosophical : …People tell me it’s a crime/ To know too much for too long a time/ She should have caught me in my prime, she would have stayed with me/ Instead of going off to sea/ And leaving me to meditate upon that simple twist of fate… The opening lines are similar but in the concluding reflections – which connect with the reference to ‘docks’ and ‘sailors’ in the previous verse – the narrator recovers some of his dignity by inferring that the encounter happened when he was not in the best frame of mind.
Dylan is virtually alone as a singer-songwriter in his habit of rewriting lyrics in performance. Many fans find this practice baffling, especially as it can be hard to catch the drift of changes in a live show which typically features loud backing music. But it is clear that Dylan often sees many of his songs – even those as acclaimed as Simple Twist of Fate – as somehow unfinished, and that he constantly attempts to ‘perfect’ his songs in live performance, even if much of his efforts may pass the audience by. One of his most original innovations as a songwriter is that he does not seem to view many of his songs as static creations. He obviously enjoys playing with his audience’s expectations and ‘keeping them on their toes’ by taunting them with unfamiliar lines. This, along with his tendency to radically change musical settings, singing styles and the phrasing of lyrics (sometimes even improvising new lyrics ‘on the spot’, means that such songs become ‘multi dimensional’ in that they do not have one fixed meaning.
Simple Twist is an exemplar of this approach. In many later performances the gender roles are switched and the song is presented from the point of view of a woman, on whom the man walks out. This has surprisingly little effect on the impact of the song. Its very changeability reflects its philosophical core, which the song is indeed a ‘meditation’ on. In all its variants, Dylan is imploring us to – as he once expressed it in the song which is in many ways its ‘ancestor’ of Simple, It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue – …take what you have gathered from co-incidence… In other words, if we fail to grab our fleeting chances of true happiness and fulfilment, they can pass us by and all that will remain will be regret. One must grasp the opportunities one is presented with in life with both hands and not let them slip away.
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